The Joy and Pain of a Six Mile Depression Walk
Nothing like a lawng walk, amirite?
Dan Guercio
June 1st, 2023
I clocked 42 miles last week, nearly double what I had to fight to achieve when living in car-centric Cali. Part of it is owed to being .8mi from the nearest train, building in almost two solid miles to any trek to “the city” and the other part being that when I feel down, I follow my feet when the weather allows.
Turns out THAT’S OFTEN as both good weather and bad feelings mingle inside me—usually one pushes out the other. The walking ain’t new: I love to explore both my city and new cities this way, even when they’re car heavy. However in New York and especially in my denser-than-dense area of Queens with notes of North Brooklyn, the streets just go on and on and on.?
Bushwick alone is the size of most of Manhattan; Ridgewood, too, it’s own entire-sprawl-of-downtown sized neighborhood, making me both long for the microhoods of “the city” but also relish in getting lost in the streets of every adjacent chunk of living space.?
Block after block of roses, some ornamental and scentless, others punching through the cool, sea-tinged, but hazy breeze, (born of a wildfire up north) with their lemony and heady cloud, splay under endless brownstones and bodegas for miles in every direction.?
Then there’s the mulberry trees: currently dropping purple fruits in a tie dye radius that stains the blocks with the warnings of the first days of 80 + degree days on their way. Great, trollish, and warped drapings give off a deep and woody, sweet scent, especially when the berries aren’t ripe yet, which mingles with honeysuckles so determined that they pour out ring after ring of wood out of the tiniest opportunistic concrete cracks to smell like the pure essence of a sunny journey in the non-Manhattan boroughs.?
It’s now that they explode with that soapy, sugar notes that zap me immediately to the top of the hill my grandparents lived on in Staten Island, in 1995, or to drives home through South Brooklyn on a scorching 1993 evening, KTU’s freestyle serenading us toward the Belt PKWY.?
Today, she’s taking me to a cruise down a Brooklyn or Queens mega block, mingling the yellow and white trumpet flowers with charcoal from nearby gatherings and blunt smoke trailing off of stoops. She’s a long walk alongside a semi-neglected graveyard on the way to a backyard party on the first humid days, with mats of raspberry bushes and clumps of chamomile trying to compete with her with their fleeting pineapple tea notes.?
Honeysuckle might belong to New York now, but she’s invasive, like the rest of us non-indigenous folks ?? Keep that in mind.?
This week we’re keeping it light on links and reccos because I know you all have summer Friday brain all week after mem day, and that’s OK! Plus I just gave you like 750 words of poetic nonsense, so we’re keeping the rest brief ??.?
LATEST WORK: ????
It’s time! Im so proud of these tasty cookies! Make them yourself for a fun, berrylicious treat. Don’t be scared of the flavor combo, it’s fabulous!?
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INFLUENCED: Buying Insights ??
This week: Brow Glue ???? for yew
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EEEEvents?
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Links to Love ?? or Hate ??
While I indulged in Succession the past four tumultuous years, I wont lie the sheer number of writers making a living off of dissecting every fart on the show when its impossible to get pitches in right now is as decadent as the Roy family. If you’re a freelancer who gets to write reviews, of ANYTHING consider yourself privileged, anyone else has to develop a full features brief on just about every topic, only to be ghosted??.?
But hey, sharing this was actually PRAISE for this writer, who went so deep as to find cheesemongers and interview them, and I HOPE to develop this pitch in the first place, kudos for making culture content that requires real effort!???
BONUS LINKS FOR LINKEDIN ??
New science like this serves to reframe our idea of the physical planet we’re on as an endless resource. Most of us haven’t considered how battery electric still involves mining earth-derived compounds to create energy.
As targeted science can now show exactly where these minerals and metals exist, are we going to allow the same strip mining as previous technological waves, many of them with both unclear costs in the beginning. Then, of course, there’s the global, multinational, and very corporate secrecy preventing the public from assessing these costs when they’re first discovered.
We deserve better than another cycle of exploitation.
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Ciao amici ?????
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